Anti-vaccine activism
Activists have primarily (though far from entirely) focused on issues surrounding children, with vaccination of the young receiving pushback, and they have sought to expand beyond niche subgroups into national political debates.
"[5] However, the authors only considered the use of "newspaper articles and letters, books, journals, and pamphlets to warn against the dangers of vaccination", and did not address the impact of the internet.
[7] In November 2013 the Australian Vaccination Network was ordered by the New South Wales Administrative Decisions Tribunal to change their name so that consumers are aware of the anti-vaccination nature of the group.
Lateline reported that former AVN president Meryl Dorey "claimed she was a victim of hate groups and vested interests" in response to the ruling.
[23] Anti-vaccine activists have leveraged social media to develop interconnected networks of influencers that shape people's opinion, recruit allies, impact policy[2] and monetize vaccine-related disinformation.
[28][27] Persons undertaking efforts to counter vaccine misinformation, including public health experts who use social media, have been targeted for harassment by anti-vaccine activists.
[2][14] For example, Slovakian physician Vladimír Krčméry was a prominent member of the government advisory team during the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovakia, and was the first person in that country to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
[30] In June 2023, Texas-based physician and researcher Peter Hotez tweeted his concerns about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sharing misinformation about vaccines on Joe Rogan's podcast.
[66][67] The Children's Health Defense / World Mercury Project chaired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Stop Mandatory Vaccination, run by campaigner Larry Cook, posted 54% of the advertisements.
[70] In 2023, however, state governments that were politically aligned with anti-vaccine activists successfully sought a preliminary injunction to prevent the Biden Administration from seeking to pressure social media companies into fighting misinformation.
The order issued by United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit "severely limits the ability of the White House, the surgeon general, [and] the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention... to communicate with social media companies about content related to Covid-19... that the government views as misinformation".
[73][74][75] For example, in the United States, the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) has been used to identify communities that have traditionally been under-served or are at elevated risk for infection, morbidity, and mortality.
Outreach efforts include call centers and texting campaigns, partnering with local community leaders, and holding community-based vaccine clinics.
[2] A networked community approach would differ from the current model of US public health communication, which tends to rely on a single credible messenger (e.g. Anthony Fauci) and is susceptible to disinformation attacks.
Vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine activism exist within a broader context that involves cultural tradition, religious belief, approaches to health and disease, and political affiliation.
Philadelphia physician John Redman Coxe, noting that even then false accounts were circulated of negative effects of vaccination, wrote, "Such are the falsehoods which impede the progress of the brightest discovery which has ever been made!
Time has drawn aside the veil which obstructed our knowledge of this invaluable blessing; and in the examples of the Emperor of Constantinople, of the Dowager Empress of Russia, and the King of Spain, we may date the downfall of further opposition.
[95] A series of American legal cases, beginning in various states and culminating with that of Henning Jacobson of Massachusetts in 1905, upheld the mandating of compulsory smallpox vaccination for the good of the public.
[98] In 1906, George Bernard Shaw wrote a supportive letter to the National Anti-Vaccination League, equating methods of vaccination with "rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound".
[102] Historian James Colgrove noted that Higgins "attempted to overturn the New York State's law mandating vaccination of students in public schools".
[108] The fraudulent research paper authored by Wakefield and published in The Lancet falsely claimed the vaccine was linked to colitis and autism spectrum disorders.
Promotion of the claimed link, which continued in anti-vaccination propaganda for the next three decades despite being refuted,[112][113] was estimated to have led to an increase in the incidence of measles and mumps, resulting in deaths and serious permanent injuries.
[126][127] An investigation by journalist Brian Deer found that Wakefield, the author of the original research paper linking the vaccine to autism, had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest,[128][129] had manipulated evidence,[130] and had broken other ethical codes.
[133] In January 2011, Deer published a series of reports in the British Medical Journal,[134][135][136] in which a signed editorial stated of the journalist, "It has taken the diligent scepticism of one man, standing outside medicine and science, to show that the paper was in fact an elaborate fraud.
[141] Wakefield and other anti-vaccine activists were active in the American-Somali community in Minnesota, where a drop in vaccination rates was followed by the largest measles outbreak in the state in nearly 30 years in 2017.
While earlier anti-vaccination activists focused on health impacts and safety of vaccines, recent themes increasingly involve philosophical arguments about liberty, medical freedom and parental rights.
[158][159] After the outbreak, anti-vaxxers employed racist tropes and misinformation to credit the scores of measles deaths to poverty and poor nutrition or even to the vaccine itself, but this has been discounted by the international emergency medical support that arrived in November and December.
[169][170][171] In another 2023 incident, college basketball player Bronny James experienced cardiac arrest at the Galen Center at the University of Southern California, leading to assertions that this was a result of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine; it was later revealed that the episode had been caused by a congenital heart defect.
[173] In December 2023, The New York Times published a detailed investigation of the distortion and misrepresentation of the circumstances surrounding the death of 24-year-old George Watts Jr. by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other anti-vaccine activists.
[174] Some unvaccinated persons opposed to COVID-19 vaccination began referring to themselves in social media groups as "purebloods", a term historically connoting racial purity.
